


further away

by ilia



Category: Given (Anime), Given (Manga)
Genre: Akihiko gives lackluster relationship advice, And Ritsuka is just. Angry., Depression, Flashbacks, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Mafuyu picks up the pieces, Medication, Mentions of Blood/Injury, POV Alternating, Ritsuka breaks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:55:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22327456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilia/pseuds/ilia
Summary: "What the fuck is this?" His heart is somewhere in his throat. Morbidly curious fingers click the arrow keys. Mafuyu. Mafuyu, again. Mafuyu, smiling, Mafuyu, with someone else's hand at his jaw and such a sensual look in his eyes that something inside Ritsuka slips.Mafuyu, held from behind by a boy with sandy hair and warm eyes, twin smiles stretching thier faces.Ritsuka chokes down a sound.There's no more languid summer day, no more quiet coffeeshop, no more fluttering warmth in his gut from Mafuyu's gentle attentions. He doesn't realize that he's shaking until his hands ball into fists; doesn't know he's sweating until a bead slips from his hairline and trails the line of his jaw.-Ritsuka stumbles upon Yuki's old Instagram feed.
Relationships: Satou Mafuyu/Uenoyama Ritsuka, Satou Mafuyu/Yoshida Yuuki
Comments: 85
Kudos: 858





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

> Mafuyu is soft. Ritsuka is bristly. MafuYuki is terribly fun to write, and I loathe giving myself the opportunity at all, because that means there will just be *more* of that.
> 
> Given as a whole has lodged itself somewhere just behind my sternum and I can't not think about it. This will probably have a couple chapters.

The days turn deathly humid in the summertime, and they render all of Tokyo various levels of lethargic. Outdoors, the sunshine is brutal, and inhabitants scurry from one place to another in the hopes of staying out of its hazardous rays. Indoors, the air blasts unforgivingly; sweat dries and freezes on skin.

It's a rapid sequence of hot to cold that Ritsuka feels reflects that particular summer well, flung from one extreme to the next. He works lackadasically in the store, blasted by the frigid air from the frozen section; he runs, hand sticky in Mafuyu's, to catch thier bus to rehearsal.

—Dark hair and flaming cheeks peer back at Ritsuka through the mirror as he forces a comb through his hair after his morning showers, shoves his arms into the sleeves of his work shirt, and stumbles out of the seeping humidity before he can quite recall just where it is he's going this time.

It's school break, and he feels as though he might be busier than ever.

A silence drips down the usually busy Wednesday streets as the intensity of midday heat lulls the city to a halt; in between his shift at the store and rehearsal later on, Ritsuka convenes with his friends in the sanctuary of a coffee shop. Only the caffeine can keep them going through the day without needing an impromptu siesta; only the healthy assortment of ice in each drink can keep their insides cool and minds alert.

It's three of them today, in their usual corner of a midtown haunt, stuffed into a conservative booth and gathered around the same computer. It's with voices down, and rapid fingers, and scheming looks in their eyes that they go about their business.

Ritsuka has taken a spot in the middle, the computer screen lighting the bottom of his cheeks and his lashes. It's a lighting which he presumes must make him look ridiculous as fuck with the way Mafuyu glances towards him sometimes, a smile tugging at the corner of the boy's mouth that has Ritsuka's gut sweeping in the way it now does every time he catches Mafuyu's eyes on him. To his left, Haruki leans over the keys, poking a finger none too delicately towards the screen and speaking in a hushed tone, hair bound in something sloppy at the crown of his head.

Twin guitar cases lean against the side of the table; Haruki's bass has been abandoned back at the studio. Recently, Haruki's primary companion has been his computer—the key instrument towards furthering the band's social media presence so they can _make it big._ It's a concept Mafuyu certainly doesn't understand, for the times he's asked about it, one Ritsuka isn't entirely aligned with either if he's being completely honest. But he's born witness to Haruki's mad schemes a little too long to know not to object when he gets that look in his eye.

Besides, they're happy times, the three of them slacking on their rehearsing and crammed into a single man's space while Akihiko is away and unable to command them as he might—doing god knows what with his strange house mate, Haruki had commentated some hours prior, with a temperamental flip of his then loose hair that Ritsuka hadn't cared to put much effort into interpreting—these are the only times that he is so close with Mafuyu. Close enough that their thighs press together underneath the table, that Mafuyu's jaw finds Ritsuka's shoulder, that Ritsuka can glance down and catch the flourescent lights bouncing off Mafuyu's pink lashes.

"No, no," Haruki groans, as Ritsuka makes a series of uninformed clicks. "We only want to follow bands, don't you remember? Bands, and people in the industry, or else it'll mess up our ratio!"

"Our ratio?"

Haruki's eyes roll so far back, Ritsuka wonders vaguely if they'll detach altogether. "Our ratio, Ue! Nobody will want to engage with us if we follow more than follows us back, it'll make us look desperate."

"Yeah. Desperate." Mafuyu's chin prods the tender muscle at Ritsuka's shoulder, a laugh on his lips. "Jeez, _Uenoyama-chan_."

Ritsuka's teeth clench. "All I'm saying is that caring this much will make us look dumber than anything else."

"Fuck's sake, you don't know about anything anyway." Haruki's finger flicks at Ritsuka's temple, and Mafuyu's at the other, and Ritsuka glares at each of them in turn; to his left, Haruki has wrenched the computer from Ritsuka's pitifully inexperienced fingertips; to his right, Mafuyu smiles at him, and Ritsuka's face warms.

"You hot?" Mafuyu's finger prods at Ritsuka's cheek, pink brows arched in concern. "I'll get us a refill."

"Kay."

There's a sound of sticky flesh being pulled tenderly from the fake leather seats, and Mafuyu disappears into the coffee house beyond.

"Honestly, the two of you could at least try to help," Haruki grumbles, slamming the buttons of his computer as though exacting upon them a personal and violent vendetta. "If I knew I'd be surrounded by your awkward flirting this summer, I woulda opted to go north with my friends instead."

"Sucks to be you." Ritsuka plucks up his glass from the table and sucks the dregs from the bottom in a long, drawn out sound. His cheeks are still warm—fuck that, they positively burn where Mafuyu had touched him, but he's also learned long ago to not give Haruki the benefit of his griping. "You were the one who gave us permission, Haru-san. Not gonna apologize after that."

"Did I do that? Funny how one hardly remembers these things." There's the flashing of faces on the computer, an Instagram feed of girls in bikinis and green drinks with neon umbrellas and all the makings of a beach concert. Haruki hits the _follow_ , and the screen is populated with a list of suggestions.

_Follow, engage, comment, and post,_ as he had lectured the band late one evening as they crouched around Ritsuka's cell. _Follow, engage, comment, and post, and how pathetic is it really that I, the oldest, have to dictate to you teenagers how to properly use social media?_

—Haruki's face, twisted in skepticism, towards Akihiko. _Just how did we get unlucky enough to scrape up the only two teenagers who don't give a shit about cell phones?_

"Still, it must be nice." It's Haruki's voice that lures Ritsuka back to the present, where he's been eyeing the screen with unfocused eyes and gnawing none too carefully on the plastic straw shoved among the seeping cubes of ice in his glass.

"Mm?"

"Having someone." Haruki's gaze wanders across the little coffee shop, and towards the mop of pink hair at the counter. Together, they watch Mafuyu place his order, and count a handfull of yen for the casheir. Suddenly, his face turns towards Ritsuka, and Ritsuka can hardly breathe for the way those eyes just go through him.

"Him?"

"Anyone." Haruki shrugs. "Having someone to share the heat with. You know. Go swimming. Take cold showers, and actually be able to stand touching one another. Wander around Tokyo when it gets dark and eat ice cream bars."

Ritsuka's face is warm. "We haven't done—" he coughs. "Any of those yet."

"All in good time." Still, Haruki sighs, attentions reverted to the Instagram feed on his little beat-up plastic laptop, and his fingers tap twice on a gleaming sticker of a drumset he's stuck right beside the trackpad before returning to work. "I envy you that, too."

Together, they find three more bands to follow—two of which are local, another in a region to the south.

"They wear such bright colors," Haruki sighs as they scroll through the latter's page for suggestions. "I bet they're known for it. It helps a band's image to dress in a way that's noticeable."

"Pigs'll fly before you can get Kaji-san to believe one syllable of that."

"You seriously underestimate my influence, Ue." Once again, Haruki's flipping through suggestions like a madman, eyes sharp, brows drawn. "Hey, what's this?"

"Hmm?"

The page Haruki pulls up isn't like others they've seen yet those few weeks. The photographs center less on cigarettes and instruments, less on groups of friends and midnight gatherings. Ritsuka blinks.

There's pink, in every photograph; a person with a mop of soft, pink, untamed hair.

"Isn't this—"

Haruki clicks on a photograph at random, and Ritsuka's eyes widen.

It's a body from the waist up, a body wearing a crumpled white uniform shirt unbottoned to the sternum. The head is turned to the side, a warmth on the subject's cheeks; a ray of light, from some undistinguishable light source, crosses his body and touches his lashes. The figure is laying down as though he hasn't a care in the world, tethered somewhere in the realm between consciousness and sleep; lethargic, angelic, and placid.

Ritsuka's gaze traces the light as it crosses the body's pink hair and lashes, the gentle nose and long, careful fingertips.

Underneath the photograph, the caption reads _mine._

There's a horrible twisting in Ritsuka's gut as he reads the familiar name at the profile.

"Ue." Haruki glances from Ritsuka's face, back to the computer, and makes to take it from Ritsuka's hands. "Ue-kun, maybe we shouldn't—"

"What the fuck is this?" His heart is somewhere in his throat. Morbidly curious fingers click the arrow keys. Mafuyu. Mafuyu, again. Mafuyu, smiling, Mafuyu, with someone else's hand at his jaw and such a sensual look in his eyes that something inside Ritsuka slips.

Mafuyu, held from behind by a boy with sandy hair and warm eyes, twin smiles stretching thier faces. _My better half, my whole, all of me._

Ritsuka chokes down a sound.

There's no more languid summer day, no more quiet coffeeshop, no more fluttering warmth in his gut from Mafuyu's gentle attentions. He doesn't realize that he's shaking until his hands ball into fists; doesn't know he's sweating until a bead slips from his hairline and trails the line of his jaw.

"Uenoyama," Haruki tries again, and Ritsuka is distracted long enough for Mafuyu's return to the table, for the chilled coffee to be set in front of him and Mafuyu's smile to stutter at the look at Ritsuka's own face.

"What's wrong?" Mafuyu asks, and then, again. Softer. "Ritsuka, is everything okay?"

Ritsuka's facade is crumbling, paper thin, behind Mafuyu's inquiries. He feels as though he may vomit.

"Haruki-san?" Mafuyu tries next.

The sound from Haruki's throat is resigned. He shoves the screen of his computer back just so, enough for Mafuyu to catch the entwined figures upon the screen.

There's a moment where the color drains from Mafuyu's cheeks, where something in his irises deepen in that strange way Ritsuka catches sometimes when he doesn't mean to. When they're walking in silence, Mafuyu deep in thought, when Ritsuka sees something pass over his boyfriend's face that he feel that he shouldn't. When he gets the irredeemable sensation that he's intruding somehow.

Intruding, unwanted, a spare, an extra.

"Oh." Mafuyu's face is contorted, and for an aching, extensive moment, there's only silence between the three of them; Haruki's horrified face, Ritsuka's shaking hands, and the swimming in Mafuyu's eyes, that pain, pain like Ritsuka has almost never seen before on Mafuyu without the perforated head of a microphone pressed against his mouth.

Mafuyu sits again, and the air in the little booth is so thick Ritsuka can hardly breathe.

Haruki clears his throat. "Well. Let's keep going, shall we?"

They resume in relative silence, the calm demeanor of the rest of the coffee shop almost mocking in the heavy quality of the tense air between the three of them. Haruki takes command of the laptop once again, navigates from Mafuyu's ex boyfriend's profile quickly, and they resume their hunt. Ritsuka's fingers coil into fists at his lap.

There's something sick churning in the pit of his stomach, a feeling—thanks to Mafuyu—he's able to recognize very easily now. It's jealousy to an overwhelming degree, it leaves him breathless, and every time his gaze lands on Mafuyu, he has to restrain himself from reaching out. To hit the sad look off of his face perhaps, or to take the boy's hand between two of his own, or to drag Mafuyu towards him and kiss the memory of other lips off of Mafuyu's own. Anything to remind him that he still has a place here, in the land of the living.

Mafuyu catches Ritsuka's eyes on him only once, and affords him a hesitant smile that has Ritsuka's cheeks ruddying shamefully. He turns back to the computer with determination.

It takes an hour longer until Haruki proclaims himself satisfied, snapping shut the laptop and dismissing them all with an ominous _until next time,_ which Ritsuka would rather not diagnose if he can help it. The bassist leaves towards the campus, and Ritsuka and Mafuyu depart towards the train.

Silence drags out between them as they walk; their shadows stretch, long and ominous, in front of them on the pavement. The gurgling in Ritsuka's gut still seems too dangerous to risk opening his mouth, and for Mafuyu, he's doing that _thing_ he does where he doesn't seem entirely present.

They climb the stairs to the platform in heavy steps.

The sun is setting behind them, and a warm summer breeze passes them by, and the way Mafuyu's coiling hair moves in the wind is almost surreal. While his eyes are focused somewhere far away, Ritsuka allows himself a good, long look.

Fuck, Mafuyu is unreasonably beautiful, even when he's upset. Underneath the lights of the setting sun, the boy is rendered a mess of yellows and pinks, so soft it seems that he might be taken apart and carried away by the wind if Ritsuka were to as much as touch him.

He steps forward, and presses his forehead into Mafuyu's temple, and is almost shocked at how solid it feels. Solid, and warm, and forgiving—Mafuyu's head leans against Ritsuka's, just enough touch to get his heart racing.

"Mafuyu."

"Mm."

Ritsuka fucking hates apologizing. "I'm sorry."

"Oh." Mafuyu seems to think about it for a time longer. "It's okay."

But it's not, Ritsuka wants to bite back—how could it be? How could something that contorts Mafuyu's face in such a horrible pain ever be okay? And how can he ever hope to forgive himself for being the one to cause Mafuyu any more pain than he's already experienced?

He chances a look around them, and takes Mafuyu's hand without warning. Summer slicks the soft spots where their palms touch.

He kisses each finger until he has Mafuyu's full attention—and then again, until Mafuyu is smiling, and squealing, and pushing him away, fingers in Ritsuka's fine hair, nose pressing into his cheek. They touch harmlessly until it feels as though the space between them is only occupied by them both.

-

Mafuyu doesn't quite remember how he returns home, or the train ride at all—there's the warmth of Ritsuka's hand laced with his, and the shifting of the train underneath the soles of his high-tops, and then nothing the solitude of his stop and early evening all around him.

He avoids the street lights as he trods the familiar route to his apartment, winding a haphazard pathway down the concrete while the guitar thumps on his back. Sweat runs down the back of his neck, and Mafuyu closes his eyes as he goes—he tries to recall only the sensation of Ritsuka's mouth on his fingertips, and his fine hair, and the way his blue eyes turn so warm whenever he looks at Mafuyu when they're alone. The smell of his shampoo, and the ruddying of his cheeks when Mafuyu touches him without warning.

Little things Mafuyu has noticed over the time they've known one another, little things he likes to recall when he's feeling especially vacant. When the fingers that strum a budding melody on his guitar have turned fumbly and unsure, and the stacks of CDs and vinyl in the corner of his room seem to climb skyward until they are a mountain Mafuyu much doubts he will ever have the energy to summit.

The air is on at home; the hallways are cold and dark, and Mafuyu lingers at the doorway even after he's stepped out of his shoes.

His back hits the wall, and he slides to the cool floor, empty but for the guitar pressed to his front.

Yuki.

His fingers wrap about the neck of the guitar. They tighten until the joints ache.

Yuki.

Mafuyu gasps at the bolt of feeling that wracks his abdomen. He buries his head into his arms.

_Yuki_.

—It's a placid Monday afternoon, and the leaves outside the window are a fine golden red. Soon, they'll detach from the trees and fall to the ground and his walk to school will be littered with percussive beats as he goes. Crunch, crunch, underneath the soles of his new high-tops.

They lounge, legs twined. The rough abrasion of Yuki's dark hair is a jarring contrast against the pink wisps of Mafuyu's own. His knee traces the length of Yuki's femur. His ear, flush with Yuki's chest, is treated to the vibrations of a contented hum.

It smells like _them_ —like bodies, entangled, unwashed, untreated. It smells like the lingering leather of Yuki's jacket that Mafuyu has commandeered, now discarded beside Mafuyu's unused pillow and the lump of his clothes from the night prior. It smells like something Mafuyu will chase for years later and never be able to again obtain.

If only he knew then how important that one smell would be. If only he could find a way to bottle it up so that he could smell it one last time, wrap himself in the leather of Yuki's jacket and pretend he might be able to relive that joy one instant longer.

Mafuyu drags his knee along Yuki's femur one more time.

"Don't," comes Yuki's voice from above him, resonating in the cavity of his chest to Mafuyu's delight. "You know I'm ticklish there."

"You're ticklish everywhere."

"And yet you keep touching me."

"And yet, you throw such a fit when I don't."

There's a begrudingly proud look in Yuki's eyes when Mafuyu twists up to see, the same he is afforded every time his words are wrapped in thorns. It sparks a pride low in Mafuyu's belly, to be looked at like that.

"You want to know what it's like?" Yuki asks, and it's all over, the peace between them is shattered in the long pull of Yuki's fingers around Mafuyu's waist and at the soft spots behind his knees, and Mafuyu is howling and pleading for him to stop and Yuki—true to form—doesn't.

Mafuyu is encased in a wall of blankets, and pillows, and yesterday's clothes, and Yuki's mouth is on his, and Mafuyu is home.

They spend their days like this less frequently now, what with Yuki's job and his band and the long days at different schools, respective friends, and homework. Mafuyu closes his eyes, and twines his fingers in Yuki's hair, and brushes the nub of his new earring.

Even then, he wanted to remember all he could—even then, he tasted the bitter winds of change lingering just outside Yuki's window, ready to be let in.

Yuki pulls back. His lashes trace a pathway along Mafuyu's jaw.

"Fuck, I'm so in love with you," he breathes, and Mafuyu squirms at the heat.

"And you."

"Whatever."

Mafuyu laughs. " _Whatever_."

Yuki reaches to the bedside table, and snatches up his phone. Mafuyu's eyes roll; he twists his head to the side. To the soft leather of Yuki's jacket, and his clothes and the remains of yesterday's store-bought bentos, and the pick for Yuki's guitar. All shoved to the side of the bed to make just enough space for them both.

"You're really going to take another picture of me?"

Yuki pouts as he rights himself onto his knees. "You're beautiful. Why shouldn't I?"

"Mm." Mafuyu deliberates. "What if one day I want to run for office?"

"What if one day, it becomes the cover of the world's greatest album?"

Mafuyu's features twist together as Yuki moves in for another kiss. There's a way Yuki does it sometimes, when they're tangled in bed together or left in class alone or in the locker rooms when all the other boys have gone out to the gym, where he drags his jaw along Mafuyu's cheek, grating it raw with the stubble. It turns Mafuyu red and irritated for hours.

Mafuyu winces away. "I can't see Hiiragi or Shizu being too keen on that."

"Shizu, perhaps." There's something swimming in Yuki's eyes that Mafuyu can't quite discern.

"What?"

"Nevermind me, baby." Yuki's fingers trail along Mafuyu's jaw, up his nose and into his hair, mussing it just _so_ , pulling up Mafuyu's face until they're eye to eye, until Mafuyu cannot do anything but peer at Yuki through his lashes and feel the way the sudden touch has set his heart pounding.

They peer at one another just like that—curious, almost, as though seeing one another for the very first time, hearts pounding, breaths choppy. It's fall outside, and Yuki's room is a mess, and from the hallway Mafuyu can hear the sounds of breakfast being made, but it all fades away. Until there is just Yuki and him, him and Yuki, trembling and staring at one another like they had the very first time they'd done this. When Yuki's fingers had wandered a little too far, and his mouth had come just a little too close, and he had declared in a whisper that he really wanted to kiss Mafuyu, just like that.

Yuki bites the tip of Mafuyu's nose, and Mafuyu jumps. Yuki's already sat up on his knees.

"Smile, baby." Yuki winks and aims the camera Mafuyu's way. "One day, you might just be a star."

—He doesn't remember crawling into his cold bed. He doesn't remember whether he locked the door or not, or how the guitar got out of its case. Mafuyu blinks through eyes saturated with crust, and doesn't remember crying, either.

Even now, he can't seem to decide which is better, not being able to cry or crying too much. The months before were permeated with a nothingness the consistency of tar, and now he feels like a sleeping limb freshly awakened and shaken out. His nerve endings are raw; he cries, and he feels, at the drop of a hat.

He can hardly move for the exhaustion that has taken over his body; it's a lethargy that forces him deep into the mattress. His glazed-over eyes see his cell at the edge of the bedspread.

Ritsuka.

It takes all his effort to force himself onto an elbow, and grab his cell. He types something quick.

_Nice seeing you today._

Mafuyu brushes away the pink hair that's fallen into his eyes, and tries another.

_I'm sorry if you saw something you didn't like._

He hangs his head in his arms, and waits with a hollow stomach for the response.

It takes some time; enough for Mafuyu's mother to return home and Tama to begin his protocol of yapping for dinner, and still Mafuyu cannot seem to summon the courage to move. His cheek presses against the headboard of the bed, and his eyes shut, and he tries his best not to think of Yuri, or those pictures.

—"What do you plan to do with them, anyway?" He brings up the courage to ask once, and only once.

The setting sun feathers across Yuki's highlighted hair in a way that makes him look almost ethereal, and glints off of the hoop in his ear. "With what?"

"The pictures." Mafuyu's fingers glance across Yuki's sleeve. He doesn't like when Yuki gets like this, detached almost, eyes unfocused on a spot somewhere in the distance and fingernails pressing little crescents into the flesh of his hand. He worries, but he doesn't know how to _say_ that he worries. Later, it will be one of his greatest regrets. "The ones you take of me. The ones you post. What if something happens with us, and your account is full of me? What happens—"

Yuki's hand snaps forward, and catches Mafuyu's collar. His gaze turns on Mafuyu. There's a look there that Mafuyu has only seen a few times, that same hard expression that had contorted Yuki's little face when Mafuyu's father was dragged away in cuffs, when Mafuyu was bleeding and his mother sobbing and Yuki's hand had been the only thing in the world.

"Why would you ask something so dumb? I'll leave them," Yuki snaps. "I'll leave them _forever_. Because if you're not mine anymore, then you were once, and I'd rather die than forget that."

Mafuyu blinks up at his boyfriend. He's possessed by a surge of gratefulness. He nods, and gently disentangles Yuki's hard grip from the front of his shirt. Later, they'll kiss in the subway on their way home.

—His phone pings, and Mafuyu opens bleary eyes to a darker sky outside and the smell of his mother's turn to cook dinner.

_It's fine._

The bed, at least, welcomes Mafuyu's body and tears without protest.


	2. two

The tangled emotions in his gut keep Ritsuka company on his own way home, through dinner which is dumped less-than-ceremoniously in front of his sister and through his homework, which is completed halfheartedly and only halfway. It's only after, when he's able to sit cross-legged in the center of his room and unzip his guitar, that Ritsuka begins to evaluate them.

Bit by bit. His fingers pluck, erroneous and uncertain, along the strings; he grates his nails against the delicate perforations on the E and the sound in his headphones grates at his ears. Strand by strand, he plucks at the knot in his gut, trying out threads to see if they will lead to a merciful lessening of his foul mood.

Eventually Ritsuka sets down the guitar too, resigned to a night where creation is simply out of his reach.

It's not that this type of block is new to him. Artist's block plagues Ritsuka much like it plagues other creators: sporadically, without reason, cause, or welcome. It's a sensation that leaves him restless and feeling pent up for days at a time, a man with an itch on his back that he can’t quite reach, until he's able to sit down and force out a riff that isn't totally fucking worthless.

Ritsuka pulls his knees to his chest, and smashes his face deep against them. He heaves a breath between his thighs and grabs at his own hair.

Still, artist's block is nothing compared to artist's block in love. When Mafuyu is miserable, there's nothing Ritsuka can do to create at all. Playing is unsubstantial in comparison to the music of Mafuyu’s fingers curling in his.

—He closes his eyes and still, Mafuyu's hurting face looks out at him, that look as though the swell of memories had overtaken him and dragged him out even further than before.

Ritsuka abandons his guitar, heaves his corpse into bed, buries his head in the pillow, and resigns himself to feeling pathetic.

And still, it's an insatiable, masochistic curiosity that he feels now, that same curiosity that grips at him when Yuki is mentioned or Mafuyu's last song is complimented in front of them, when Mafuyu's eyes focus somewhere far away and Ritsuka suddenly wants to touch as though to banish the ghost that still clings to the boy's fingertips.

(Sometimes, Ritsuka wants to take Mafuyu by the shoulders and shake until his head is snapping back and forth and ask just why it is he can't remain in the real world for once? If he, Ritsuka, is not enough to keep Mafuyu from wandering back to someone who’s long dead?)

—He loathes himself for reaching for his phone. He loathes himself for typing in the information he still remembers from the cafe. He loathes himself for tapping on the name of Yuki's profile. But he's sick with curiosity. Ritsuka pulls his jaw from the cave of his abdomen and thighs and further fucks up an already sour mood.

The feed at a glance is peppered with color; Mafuyu's pink hair, and the saturated cherry tone of the Gibson. Ritsuka's finger shakes where it hovers over the screen.

He goes picture by picture until he's able to pretend all he's doing is looking casually. He scans each photo quickly, gut lurching whenever it contains Mafuyu's shock of sunset hair, a creamy strip of flesh just underneath his shirt, his smile.

Ritsuka's fingers trace a picture of Mafuyu, wind in his hair, laughing. It's such a stark contrast to who Ritsuka knows now that he barely recognizes the boy.

Mafuyu now doesn't laugh like that, doesn't smile like that. He always has a blockage lingering just behind his eyes, a hesitation in each touch and an uncertainty between each word. As though he, too, is floating somewhere far away. As though he is too delicate to remain in the present any longer.

Ritsuka feels ill. For a moment, he loathes himself, loathes every particle of his being, loathes that he can't be the one to make Mafuyu smile like that.

Yuki was amazing, he had heard just some weeks prior, from the gossip sphere his classmates were so keen to occupy as he made his best attempt at sleeping on the hard, plasticine surface of his desk. Yuki was loud, and vivacious; a spitfire of his own accord. Yuki made friends quickly and lost them even faster; he blazed a trail that will not soon be obscured.

Ritsuka drops the phone to the mattress; he's on his knees and elbows, a fist tightened in his collar. Tears drip fast and heavy from his eyes and burn in his nose. He pulls the shirt tighter, until the collar bites at the back of his neck. His teeth grit in a sick pride. He will not make a sound.

How _pathetic_ , that Mafuyu has to settle for his second choice.

-

The following morning crawls on as though treading through wet cement, and Ritsuka chews on his lips and nails to keep himself occupied until the bell tolls lunch. All the while, his thoughts diverge from the trigonometry on the board and across the hallway to a seat in the middle row where he knows Mafuyu sits. He can imagine Mafuyu there, the sunlight hitting strawberry hair, pretty mouth wrapped around the end of his pen as he thinks.

Not about schoolwork, certainly not; Mafuyu is better at school than Ritsuka. He wonders if Mafuyu instead thinks about music during times like that, when he looks happy, when his eyes are half lidded and his lips puckered, and stop it right the fuck now, Ritsuka scolds himself, fisting a hand in his hair and tugging, resisting the urge to smack his forehead against the desk. He's pining like a lovesick schoolgirl.

Lovesick.

It's that sensation again, that ugly knot that twists in his stomach. Ritsuka's fingers coil around the edges to the desk, and he stares at the notebook underneath him until his eyes ache. The feeling of inadequacy has nipped at his heels all morning, grated him raw.

Still, he thinks of Mafuyu, because ever since that first day they wandered into the same hallway, it’s been all he can do to think of Mafuyu. Mafuyu’s big pink eyes looking at Ritsuka, his fingers trailing along the slender strings of his guitar in a way Ritsuka knows will become practiced with time. Mafuyu, whose smile lights up Ritsuka’s whole damned day, who can turn him into a puddle just by smiling. Mafuyu, whose eyes focus so far away sometimes it’s all Ritsuka can do not to retrieve him, sink his fingers into Mafuyu’s skin and drag him back to earth, back to him.

He watches the second hand tick on the clock until the bell signifies freedom.

The gymnasium smells of sweat and rubber and the harsh chemicals they use to clean the basketball team's gear, and Ritsuka keeps his hands shoved in the pockets of his slacks and his eyes cast forward as he circumnavigates the busy court, praying that he will not be hailed to play; the guitar on his back and the determined look in his eye are enough to project that he is going to meet Mafuyu to sit in their sunlit corner and play, or perhaps nap, or to do whatever it is couples do when they spend their lunches together.

Kiss, he's learned, cheeks warming at the thought. Kiss, and tangle their fingers together, and seek some happy medium between the light of the sun and the heat of one another's bodies and the cool stone walls they lean against. Taste what they brought for lunch on one another's tongues and forget how it feels to breathe properly. Kiss until their hearts hammer and lungs heave and Mafuyu’s cheeks are warm and Ritsuka is seething with frustration because he wants so desperately to be closer but doesn’t quite know how.

Maybe today, they'll kiss, too. Maybe today, Mafuyu will make that noise he made the last time they spent a happy lunch secluded in the corner of the stairs, as Ritsuka's shaking fingers and uncertain mouth had wandered to Mafuyu’s pretty, soft jaw.

So many weeks, and Ritsuka still thinks about that fucking noise.

The stairway is cold and empty when Ritsuka arrives. False sunlight gleams off of freshly polished plasticine floors. Ritsuka takes the stairs by two and pokes his head around the other corner, just to be sure. Mafuyu isn’t here.

His stomach hurts from disappointment.

-

Mafuyu's bedsheets smell of sweat, his room of the dust that comes unsettled in the summertime when heat pours in from outside, when not even the heavy curtains at his window can keep out the light. And once again, Mafuyu cannot move from the mattress.

So many months and still when he sleeps, his dreams are peppered of Yuki, of sandy hair and warm eyes and skin on skin, the smell of salt on the wind. Today, Mafuyu awakens tangled in his bedsheets and reaching for something that doesn’t exist. His arm hits the mattress as it falls back towards earth, rejected by the heavens.

The pillow is wet, his eyelids raw, crusted over with the ghost of emotions shed in dreams.

He lingers all day in bed in just this fashion, consciously avoiding the list of responsibilities kept tidily in the back of his mind. He’s become good at it over the months, at _forgetting_. He lets the sheets immerse him and wonders vaguely what it’s like to fly. What it’s like to drown.

Sometimes his cell lights up, and Mafuyu's eyes wander to the screen, but none of his messages are from Ritsuka, and the disappointment only swells with each lapsed notification. He tangles his fingers in his top sheet and pulls it over his mouth, and resigns himself to his exhaustion; another day spent in bed, not enough willpower to get his leaden joints working. Another quiet day where he, too, wonders if there's anything more to the life Yuki decided to leave.

—Cotton candy clouds obscure the sky, a perfect exterior that houses something dark and foreboding within, the smell of frost and snow on its way, and from his spot on the bus stop’s cold bench Mafuyu shivers and burrows deeper into the scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face. It’s burgundy and thick, a color Mafuyu suspects clashes magnificently with his own strawberry hair. But it’s Yuki’s, so he wears it.

“Aren’t you cold?” He asks, and looks up to where Yuki’s jaw is hovering far above him. They’ve been loitering in silence waiting for the bus for some time now, Mafuyu on the bench and Yuki behind. They stand in silence as passerbys wander along. When nobody’s looking, Yuki’s fingers trace the line of Mafuyu’s cheekbone. Mafuyu blushes every single time.

“Not as cold as you.” The smile Yuki flashes down at him is frostbitten, but still Mafuyu blinks up at it with eyes clouded. He loves Yuki like he loves the warmth that caresses him as he huddles beneath three layers of blankets.

“You didn't have to be so noble.”

“Isn’t that what boyfriends are for?”

Yuki’s thumb is at Mafuyu’s jaw, and Mafuyu burrows into the hand. Yuki laughs.

“My little cat.”

“Hush. I’m human.”

“You’re human when I say you are.” There’s the sound of weight shifting, and his face comes into Mafuyu’s field of vision to his left, a smile and penetrating, intense eyes that leave Mafuyu squirming and so, so exposed despite how many layers he has wrapped around his skinny little body.

Yuki's breath trails along the edge of Mafuyu’s jaw, and Mafuyu feels hot and cold all at once; immersed in his nest of blankets he keeps waiting on his bed throughout winter is nothing compared to Yuki touching him in ways they’re not supposed to in public. When he’s with Yuki, he wants to burn.

“God, look at you, Mafuyu,” Yuki sighs, and rummages in his pocket for his cell. The flash of the camera glints across Mafuyu’s strawberry lashes. “Look at how beautiful you are in this light.”

—Mafuyu doesn’t realize his mother has returned home until there's knocking at his door, and barely looks up when she enters. She’s always been a quiet woman, skinny and unassuming with a far-away look in her eyes that Mafuyu associates with her thoughts wandering. Pretty, he supposes, although he doesn’t know anything about _pretty_ when it comes to women. The only pretty he knows is big hands and sharp jaws, deep voices and a thumb pressed hard into the palm of his hand.

But he knows her to be soft and sweet and kind, to make him food and to feed his dog and to touch his head in this way she has that makes everything feel like it will be okay. But he loves her, and shifts from his spot when the mattress dips beneath her weight. Pleading eyes filled with shame peer up at her.

“Ka-san.”

She merely sighs, and stoops at the sound of scratching and whining that Mafuyu’s ignored at the door of his room all day. Tama’s fluffy little body is settled on the bed, a meager weight.

Tama’s tongue darts across Mafuyu’s dry cheeks, and he remembers the way Yuki used to kiss him. His eyes squeeze shut. There’s an empty cavity in his chest, and it’s infected, and it hurts so bad. He wants Ritsuka to answer his phone.

“Are you feeling okay?” His mother asks. Mafuyu nods against sticky, sweaty bedsheets. He’d rather not worry her more than is necessary.

For all the ways Mafuyu bled at the hands of their father, his mother bled twice as much. To this day, Mafuyu remembers the screaming he heard from his room through the pillow he had wrapped about his head, fingernails in his arms, his worn out action figure held tight between his knees, facing outward as though a little piece of beloved plastic with chipping paint might just protect him from any harm turned his way. It was his favorite toy. He wonders where it is now.

The action figure had the same hair as Yuki, he remembers even now. Sandy and unkempt. 

“You didn’t go to school today,” his mother comments.

Mafuyu shakes his head.

“Did you take your medicine?”

Again.

“Mafuyu.” The beleaguered sound that she sighs contrasts with the careful thread of fingers through his curls. “You have to get up, darling. You have to take care of yourself.”

“I have rehearsal later.” Mafuyu’s finger trails along the line in her slacks.

“Will you go?”

“Mm.”

“Good.” She swoops down to kiss him, and rubs the top of his head in the way he so likes. She leaves his room with a “walk Tama-chan before you go."

-

Boxes of instant yakisoba land with loud thunks on the shelves, unrestrained and aggressive. Ritsuka reaches blindly into the basket of to-be-stocked, eyes glazing over from the mere effort of a poor man’s existence. He hardly has the energy to mind that he’s placing them upright correctly for the nausea in his insides, the tangling displeasure in his gut.

Akihiko kneels beside him, and flicks the side of his temple so violently he jumps.

“Fuck you."

“Some mood you’re in,” Akihiko complains in that steady way he has of letting Ritsuka know he’s walking a fine line. “Worse than usual. Did you not get your beauty rest during classes?”

“I don’t just sleep during classes.”

“Filthy fucking liar.” Akihiko elapses into quiet, and Ritsuka reaches back into the basket of shrink-wrapped packs. One by one, he lines them up on the shelves. One by one, he compartmentalizes his emotions into little boxes.

To say he didn’t hide out in the stairwell during lunch that day and look at a certain Instagram feed would be a lie. It hurt like a burn. It hurt like pressing your thumb into a fresh bruise. He can’t get it out of his fucking head.

That Yuki was mad for Mafuyu has always been clear, that and understandable—Mafuyu’s too pretty for his own good, his smile reaches bone-deep. Ritsuka knows well the way it lights him up from the chest out, wants to tuck it away and keep it in his pocket for rainy days.

It’s seeing love clear as day in Mafuyu’s eyes in those pictures that’s sending chills up his spine. There’s an ugly voice: he’ll never look at you that way.

He feels replaceable. One by one, yakisoba is stacked on the narrow shelves.

“Mafuyu?” Akihiko asks suddenly.

Ritsuka rolls a lip between his teeth rather than reply.

“Fuck.” Akihiko’s wide hand pats a consoling rhythm upon Ritsuka’s back. “Love’s hard, kid."

Ritsuka doesn’t know why it gets to him, only that it does, that the kind touch and words seep deep into his flesh. Ritsuka’s head falls between his knees as fingers steady his weight against the metallic shelving upon which he’s piling unhealthy, cheap sustenance, the sort he usually is craving right around this time, but now not even an obscene amount of cheap food can fill the gap he feels inside him.

“Kaji-san,” Ritsuka grits out, when Akihiko makes to step away.

“Mm?”

Ritsuka stands, wobbling on exhausted knees from too much kneeling, face boiling in preemptive shame.

“Am I a good person?” He swallows. “Would you ever want to be with me over someone else?”

It’s a mercy Akihiko is much smarter than he acts, or else Ritsuka would be receiving well-earned laughter, and he supposes it’s a relief the only torture he gets in turn for the shameful question is an elongated stretch of Akihiko’s silence. Ritsuka trembles, and Akihiko judges him, and Ritsuka grits his teeth and balls his fingers into tight sweaty fists. He hates being this weak. He hates allowing Mafuyu’s breathy sighs and slender fingers into his mind and heart like this, giving someone else the power to _ruin_.

Because god, how Mafuyu could ruin him if he wanted to. Because Ritsuka doesn’t know uncertainty in any form better than wrapped in the strawberry visage of Mafuyu, sweet and soft and foggy-eyed and a force wild enough to turn his world upside down, skew his perception. Because there are times when Mafuyu touches Ritsuka’s hand, and Ritsuka thinks he won’t be able to breathe properly again. Because there are these little things that Mafuyu does, the triangular cut of his sandwiches and the gentle fingers on strings and the lull of his voice, that makes Ritsuka want to hollow out a part of his chest and fit Mafuyu inside there like some inane serial killer’s rendition of a puzzle.

(He wonders if he will ever feel this way with a girl, and dismisses the thought, there’s nothing except Mafuyu.)

“Isn’t that something you should be asking your boyfriend?” Akihiko asks, blunt as a stone.

“He’s—“ impossible, Ritsuka thinks. An alien resident of a faraway planet. So lost in the past sometimes that Ritsuka would do anything just for a chance to tangle his fingers in the trailing tendrils of Mafuyu he’s left behind and pull him back. “He’s hard to read.”

Akihiko appears to be chewing on his own tongue as he watches Ritsuka squirm.

“He is.” A heavy hand touches on Ritsuka’s shoulder. “But yeah, you’re a good one, Ue. Mafuyu might be in the clouds, but he’s not blind.”

They resume their tasks, and Ritsuka forces himself to concentrate on the arbitrary repetitiveness of it all. Inside, he plucks at the knot inside his gut until it’s loosened some, and thinks of the way Mafuyu’s lips feel on his own.

It’s only after they’ve gathered their smocks and tossed them in the back room and clocked out at the little plastic device that sits beside the register that Akihiko brings up Ritsuka’s trouble again, in a way that’s so lighthearted Ritsuka hardly notices but for the way Akihiko’s fingers fidget with his keys. On the ring there’s a squat one for his bike, and a long, slender silver key that looks like it might be for an apartment. Akihiko’s thumb slides down the jagged edge.

“You know, Ue,” he starts, and tosses the helmet back. Ritsuka climbs onto the bike behind him, feeling every part the cumbersome fool, toting a precious guitar on a bike on the way to rehearsal. “Sometimes the geniuses are the most tricky, but don’t go underestimating that passion. It’s harder than you would think to go without it, or turn it down.”

Ritsuka blinks. “Thanks, Kaji- _senpai_.”

“Yikes. Spare me, will you?” Akihiko’s rings glint in the light of the setting sun as his hand waves Ritsuka’s formalities to the side. “You’re not my type, sourpuss”

-

When Ritsuka plays his guitar, he creates worlds all his own. It's a process consisting of the perfect duality of his fingers and his instrument, and at some point what might just be dismissed as music hardens into form, more tangible than the floor beneath his feet, the metal stand at his front. 

When playing is easy, his trail is eased by endorphins the whole way. They carry him along in his godlike processes. They leave his ears pounding with blood and so high, so elated he can hardly speak for the feeling, because there’s nothing that words can say that music can’t express better. No words that couldn’t be more easily strummed into being with the six strings of his guitar and an amp cranked _loud_.

But when playing is hard, he suffers greater pain than that time he was eleven and had fallen playing basketball, and torn a bloody hole in his leg. Then, Ritsuka had watched the blood pour and pool onto the pristine wooden floor and wondered vaguely if it would stain. Now, he knows it to be far worse; the damage inflicted upon his ego when he feels uncertain about his skill is irreparable. 

During today’s rehearsal, Ritsuka is the impersonation of that bloody mess. The sounds that reverberate around their practice room are innocuous, desperate things that crawl towards one another and reach out their hands with no chance of connecting. Ritsuka’s fingers are frustratingly slow on the strings as he plays, too quiet where Mafuyu is too loud, both of their sounds a nightmare, a battle.

By the time Akihiko bemoans the time it’s been since he’s had a cigarette, Ritsuka is feeling the dull throb of hopelessness.

Akihiko and Haruki abscond to the alley beyond the studio, leaving Ritsuka and Mafuyu in silence. Ritsuka settles down his guitar while Mafuyu plucks on the strings. A thick silence stretches between them.

He didn’t think Mafuyu would show up at all today, and for his presence, Ritsuka finds himself begrudgingly grateful. Even if the looks they’ve shared have bordered on anonymous; quick, emotionless glances when their gazes happen to collide. Rapid to draw away.

But now with half the band gone to smoke and Mafuyu distracted, Ritsuka looks his fill. The curve of Mafuyu’s neck is graceful as lithe fingers pluck at his Gibson tenderly. Absentmindedly, Mafuyu blows away a curl of strawberry hair that has seen fit to tangle itself into his lashes.

He’s so beautiful that Ritsuka’s chest hurts, beautiful under the same pretty light of the sunbeam pouring in through the studio’s skylight that he was in those pictures of him, pictures of Ritsuka's boyfriend that litter the social media page of some stranger.

Mafuyu’s fingers dance across the neck of his guitar. A melody, paper thin, wafts from the chamber.

Ritsuka swallows.

He wants to touch Mafuyu. He wants to grip him hard. He wants to break the boy into pieces, tear holes that only he will be able to fill. It’s a sick violence that fills his lungs; hot want the likes of which he’s never before felt. He wants Mafuyu to only look at him when those warm eyes are cast Ritsuka’s way.

He steps forward until he’s inside Mafuyu’s space. Mafuyu’s eyes don’t waver from his guitar.

“Hey,” Ritsuka says, curt. Hands shove themselves in the pockets of his jeans. “Why weren’t you at school today?”

Mafuyu’s eyes lid. The last bars of the melody warble out. “Didn’t feel well,” he says finally.

“Why not?”

He’s stooping below what his pride is comfortable with, loathe as Ritsuka may be to admit it. And maybe it would be simpler to drop to his fucking knees right here and ask if it were his fault for being so damn senseless and rough around the edges and never knowing just what it is Mafuyu needs, and never, ever doing enough.

Mafuyu merely shrugs.

His eyes are rimmed with red, Ritsuka notes. He stands as though he has been hollowed out from within, shoulders cast forward, fear in his voice. All of this, and still the most beautiful thing Ritsuka’s ever seen.

With a tight throat, Ritsuka mentally resigns himself to a love that may never be returned in full. A love that would never have happened at all if not for death. He resigns himself to the lowly spot of second place.

“I looked for you,” he says, and this time it’s more quiet. “At the stairs. Thought you would show up for lunch. Or at least tell me you were gone."

Mafuyu’s face contorts. “I’m sorry!” Shock has his warm eyes open wide, full of endearing, sweet sympathy that Ritsuka loathes works on him so well he can’t really breathe after looking into them. “I’m sorry Uenoyama-kun, it was just—one of _those_ days—"

Ritsuka's heart throbs. He catches Mafuyu’s cheeks with his fingers so that the boy's lips are compressed like a fish. He tasks himself with glaring at Mafuyu’s Pomeranian face as he wails.

“I missed you,” he forces out.

Mafuyu leans forward until his nose is tucked into Ritsuka’s collarbone and exhales a shuddering breath.

“Did you?”

“Yeah. I really did.”

He holds Mafuyu tenderly, as though he is in fact made of porcelain rather than flesh and bone. A sob escapes Mafuyu’s mouth as Ritsuka's fingers curl and twine in sunset hair.

He’ll protect this one, he’ll protect him with his whole heart and soul if he has to.

“Sometimes I think I’m not—” Mafuyu’s buried himself in Ritsuka’s wide chest. His fingers are tight in Ritsuka’s shirt. Another one that won’t retain the same shape again. Another clothing item distorted by this messy love. “I’m not sure I deserve to be missed. Sometimes I think it’s better if I stay away so nobody has to even bother with it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Missing is jagged,” Mafuyu whispers. “Missing is sharp as knives, and I don’t like it."

Ritsuka holds Mafuyu tight as the light fades out of Mafuyu’s hair. He wants to ask if Mafuyu missed him just as much, but can’t contort his tongue into the shapes it will need to make to form such a selfish sentence. 

He wonders if, this time, the blood will stain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it took me so long to update, loves! The grieving process over Given is REAL.
> 
> One more chatper to go, if all goes according to plan!
> 
> Connect with me on [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/iliawrites) if you like!


	3. three

Try as he might, Ritsuka cannot seem to salvage the following days.

He heaves his corpse out of bed in the morning after ugly dreams filled with Mafuyu’s gentle touches and soft looks directed towards someone nameless and faceless, someone who is certainly not him. Ritsuka sleeps through school, and coasts more than usual at his part time job.

At practice, the band suffers a profound disconnect. Ritsuka's fingers are sausage-like, thrice detached from his brain as he fumbles and scratches at the strings. Try as he might, he cannot seem to imbue the sensation he wants into the sound he produces, and his frustration amplifies with the repressed feeling that not even music is cooperating for him now.

There’s a fundamental dissonance in the sound they produce and he knows it’s him, knows to be the cause of Akihiko’s poorly suppressed looks of frustration and the guilt fresh in Haruki’s eyes as they return from their cigarette breaks. Ritsuka imagines his own name dying fresh off their lips with the residual scent of smoke, knows them to be talking of him when he’s not around.

More than anything, it’s the thought of being _diagnosed_ that stirs the unpleasant sensation in his gut.

Overall, if’s Mafuyu’s reaction that is the worst, as he looks over towards Ritsuka with pain in his eyes when rehearsal stutters, or as he approaches him in the middle to touch at his strings.

“I think you meant this combination.” Mafuyu’s fingers press Ritsuka’s into the neck of his guitar, and Ritsuka's flesh _tenses_ from proximity.

“I know,” he snaps.

Mafuyu’s saucer-like eyes portray an obvious hurt. “I just thought—“

“If you want another guitarist, go out and get one,” Ritsuka hisses, the wound in his chest open and infected.

He feels terrible about that one for days.

And still he can’t help but be drawn to Yuki’s Instagram account, each picture of Mafuyu looking so desperately happy that it leaves Ritsuka wondering just why it is the boy’s with him now at all. Ritsuka thumb traces Mafuyu’s smile in a picture of him resting on a set of someone’s tangled legs, and he wonders what he’ll need to do to be awarded a smile like that himself.

Still, it’s not that things change, not really. He meets with Mafuyu in the happy corner of sunshine that has become _their spot_ during lunches. They play guitar, and the notes float up to the heavens along with the hot air they breathe together as they become music. Ritsuka looks up to catch Mafuyu’s eyes on him, and his body goes numb while his heart pummels the inside of his ribs.

_Mafuyu_.

The day that becomes his breaking point begins much in the same fashion. He showers for so long that his sister is shrieking in decibels previously unheard of to man. His body feels like concrete as he pulls on his uniform. He sleeps through class, and waits for Mafuyu at lunch.

That day, Tokyo is masked by a permeating layer of cloud; the light that drifts in through the tall windows of the stairwell is desaturated and ethereal. Ritsuka plays something uninspired until Mafuyu arrives. When he looks up, his heart thumps painfully in his chest.

Mafuyu’s curls float around his head like some sort of angel. His lashes appear extra long as crisp, defining sunlight dances across his face, dashing long shadows down his cheeks as he extracts his Gibson and begins to play. His fingers are swift and sure on the strings of his guitar, and his lips soft, open. Mafuyu plays a funky little riff that will sound wonderful accompanied by Haruki’s bass.

Ritsuka is struck by how long it’s been since they’ve kissed.

Mafuyu doesn’t look up as Ritsuka’s playing ceases.

“Hey,” he starts, and edges closer, guitar deposited on his other side—because fuck his guitar, fuck music, fuck everything when he could be paying Mafuyu the attention he so desperately wants to. “Hey, Mafuyu,” again, when the boy doesn’t answer.

Ritsuka touches Mafuyu’s chin, trailing calloused fingertips along the perfect, taut flesh.

God, he’s light incarnate, he walks the boundary of strange and etherial skillfully. He’s pretty and sharp in a way Ritsuka is learning he likes about boys. Being so near to him, Ritsuka doesn’t know how he can speak for how dry his mouth is—how anyone can. Mafuyu pulls at the strings twined deep within Ritsuka’s heart. He plucks on them all violently.

Ritsuka leans forward, and tilts Mafuyu’s jaw towards him, and closes his eyes.

There’s a yelp of shock; the resonating sound of a guitar hitting something hard. All too rapidly Mafuyu’s hand is at his chest, and it presses him away _hard_.

Ritsuka recoils feet back along the linoleum stairs, until his back is pressed against the cool wall as though pinned in place by the look of horror Mafuyu is affording him. His mouth gapes.

“Crap. _Crap_. I’m sorry,” Mafuyu starts, looking down at his hand as though it might contain the answers he’s seeking. “Uenoyama-kun, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that.”

“It’s fine.” Ritsuka's chest is gaping with a fearsome pain, aftershock after aftershock of it. It resonates from the inside out, not from Mafuyu’s palm, not from the wall at his back. It’s as though his heart is on fire.

“No, it’s not, I—“ tears well in Mafuyu’s eyes. “It’s just been so long, and I was playing, and I didn’t want to be interrupted, and I thought—“

“I don’t care what you thought.”

Ritsuka stands, trembling from head to toe, heart assaulting his body, panic threading a vicious venom through his veins. His head spins with images of Mafuyu smiling, Mafuyu, leaning into Yuki’s touch, Mafuyu who wants something more than to be left alone to play Yuki’s guitar. And that leaves Ritsuka, who is nothing but a burden. Can’t play music right, can’t love Mafuyu right, can’t do anything right at all.

Mafuyu’s eyes fill with tears. “ _Uenoyama-kun_.”

“No. No, it’s fine. Play if you want. I don’t care.” Tears sting at his own eyes, his fingers slide, sweaty, on the neck of his own guitar. Ritsuka tosses it into his bag and zips it.

He hears Mafuyu warble his name one last time as the door to the stairwell slams behind him.

-

Irritation laces Ritsuka's skin as the day passes him by. His movements are stilted as he makes to write, or drag a textbook from his backpack, or pass a paper to the classmate sitting behind him. Misery keeps Ritsuka’s eyes trained on the clouds out the window to his left, thoughts anywhere but the fucking classroom he’s resigned to sit in for whatever hours remain of his sentence. He doesn’t necessarily know just where it is he wants to be, only that it’s not here—the thick clouds floating above them speak of cooler temperatures ahead, and maybe he’ll go run after school is over.

That, or anything to make him hurt in a way that doesn't come along with the grating knowledge that he’s made Mafuyu cry.

Ritsuka tangles fingers in his wiry hair and resigns himself to the wait.

Class is dismissed; the usual clamor sounds in the hallways. By then he knows what it is he has to do, even if the concept alone makes him truly miserable. Ritsuka heaves himself out of his seat.

“Hey.”

Kurihara is surrounded by her usual gaggle of friends, girls who laugh a bit too loudly when grouped together but also cheer much in the same way whenever Ritsuka has a live, and it’s long ago he’s resolved to ignore their faults. Kurihara isn’t like that, anyway. She’s quiet, contemplative—she notices things.

“Is everything okay, Uenoyama-kun?” She asks as he approaches. Ritsuka thinks he sees genuine concern etched along the lines of her gentle face.

His hand drags across the back of his neck. “I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

There are whispers as they leave the room, but Ritsuka could care less. They slide off of his shoulders like oil to water. He abandons them to taste his wake.

He leads her to a deserted stairwell, one so fundamentally different from the one he’s recently vacated that even he notices. Within it smells of dust, it’s dark and quiet and unseeming. His spot with Mafuyu, their spot, always seems like the brightest part of the school. As though a beam of sunshine centers upon Mafuyu in the grimy city that is Tokyo, no matter where he is, no matter how dark and contemplative the sky wants to act that day.

“I was wondering if I could ask you something,” he begins when they’ve settled in; Ritsuka against the wall, and her seated neatly some steps above. They don’t look at one another.

“What is it?”

“I was wondering.” Nails, this time, sink into the flesh behind his neck. The stinging pushes Ritsuka onward. “I was wondering if you could tell me about Yuki.”

His cheeks fucking _roast_.

She’s quiet for an instant, knitting her fingers together, gaze affixed upon her nails.

“Is this about Sato?” She asks suddenly.

“ _Huh?_ ”

“I—well, you know.” Kurihara's cheeks are warm, too, beneath Ritsuka’s befuddled gaze. “I noticed with the two of you, maybe because I’d seen it before, but also because I know you, uh—” Her fingers toy with her bangs; she smiles towards Ritsuka’s chest. “There’s a gentle way you look at him, you know? At Sato. Your face just—brightens up. I’ve never seen anything like it."

Ritsuka elapses into silence, him looking one way, Kurihara the other. Sweat slicks a sheen on his forehead. There’s a part of him, a _cowardly_ part of him, that wants to deny her allegations, back away and run from whatever gentleness she’s caught in him when Mafuyu’s around.

Another part remembers Mafuyu on the stairs just earlier that day. Angelic. Glowing. The center of his world.

“He’s a good person.” Ritsuka’s fingers knead at his elbow, tripping on his words. Her allegation has stunned him, flattered him; somehow, he feels set off balance just enough towards honesty. “I want to make sure, I guess. That he gets the best that he deserves. That I’m—you know. _Good_. That I’m _enough_ compared to what he’s had."

“Oh, wow,” she breathes, and Ritsuka can understand why. He’s not like this, he’s not open, he’s not romantic, not in the slightest. Ritsuka is the grumpy one that totes around a guitar and sleeps through class and listens to music decibels into ear-shattering range. He too has noticed the inconsistencies in his devil-may-care attitude and the oppressive sensations that Mafuyu brings out in him. Like he’s a different person.

A better one.

They sit in silence. Ritsuka’s face burns.

“He was loud,” Kurihara says finally.

“Mm?” He looks up a little too fast.

There’s a gentle smile on her face; when she talks, it’s as though pulling the words out from somewhere deep. Each one is handled carefully. Each thought is dusted, cleaned, set to dry in long-forgotten sunshine. “ _Yuki_. He was loud. He lived so fiercely. He lived like he was trying to suck up as much life as he could, just so that he could taste it, chew it up and spit it out.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not sure. It’s just a feeling.” She laughs, and continues. “Like everything was amped up, if that makes sense. Saturated. When she sun shone, it shone for him. When he played sports, the ball gravitated towards him. When he made his friends smile, they were happy for days, and when he got into fights with his enemies, well. You have to imagine it wasn’t much fun to be a part of that drama. Especially not in middle school.”

Ritsuka grins something wry. “I bet.” 

“I spent a lot of time thinking about him, you know. After he died.” Kurihara's voice grows almost imperceptibly quiet; Ritsuka has to lean in to catch her words. “I wondered if there was a way to tell, any way he asked for help that we simply hadn’t noticed. When I think about it even now, I realize there was. He lived like he knew he wouldn’t be living for much longer.”

“Oh.” Somewhere in his head, an image forms. Sandy hair. Big hands. A too-hot fire burning through meager kindling.

“And Mafu—Sato?” He asks, awkward again at the correction.

“I don’t know.” Kurihara shrugs, and stands; she brushes off her skirt so that the plaits fall neatly across her thighs. “Tell you the truth, he always seemed to fade into the background where Yuki was concerned.” 

Ritsuka holds back a scoff. “Sounds like everyone did.”

“Maybe.” Kurihara shrugs again, and makes to leave, footsteps halting halfway between the stairwell and the door to the corridor beyond. “But you know, I don’t think I’d ever have heard Mafuyu sing like that before. If you were the one that got him to sing, Uenoyama-kun, I think there’s something special there.”

Her footsteps fade into the clatter of students enjoying the evening’s freedoms as she makes her way down the hallway beyond.

-

Mafuyu is seized by an acutely ghostlike sensation on his walk home; soft and light and paper thin, a plastic bag buffeted by the wind. He doesn’t allow himself to think as he goes, as one city-dirtied turquoise high-top falls into step beside the other and his guitar sways on his back. His mind is on the warmth of sunshine on his head and shoulders, the lazy way his eyes lose focus when he goes too long without blinking.

When he gets home, he leaves his things in a mess in the interior stoop. It’s only the Gibson that he pulls further into the house, down the hall (feet winding around Tama’s incessant jumping and yapping) and into bed with him.

Mafuyu stares at the bright orange pill bottle beside his bed, a bottle opened only so that he can take out medicine and flush the little pills, of no other use to him. He wonders vaguely, offhandedly, what it’s like to die.

—"They keep you from feeling.”

Yuki’s voice drifts across the bedsheets, somewhat muffled from where his jaw is tucked into the center of Mafuyu’s chest. Mafuyu twists to look at him, curiously. The fading winter sunlight turns Yuki's lashes into a haze of pink and purple hues, Yuki's fingers are tight on Mafuyu's thigh. They finger the ghosts of chords not yet written.

The other hand holds an orange bottle of pills much like the one that rests beside Mafuyu’s bedside today. It’s full. It’s unopened. And yet, it bears the signs of wear, scratches along the exterior, the peeling of the label. Hands have run over this bottle many times before.

There’s unadulterated loathing on Yuki’s voice, something so shockingly fresh that Mafuyu lifts his head from the pillow to hear better.

“What does?"

"The drugs." Yuki snorts something derisive. His gaze is distorted, something murky swimming in the depths of the warm eyes, focused somewhere beyond the stubbled ceiling above Mafuyu's bed. He’s been doing this lately. Talking half-sentences, trailing away, mind elsewhere. And Mafuyu is _worried_. "They keep you from feeling shit. No sorrow, no joy, no excitement, nothing. I'd rather die than not be able to feel.”

—A moan permeates the still air of Mafuyu’s room, cool, _unnatural_ air for how hot Tokyo still feels outside. The slick sensation on his cheeks tells Mafuyu he’s crying. He drags his blankets around skinny shoulders to no avail.

He’s trembling, muscles drawn tight, tears slipping down his face, unobstructed. Mafuyu wants to scream into his pillow.

He’s sick to death of this game, this silence, this cold, the dent in his bed where Yuki used to sleep, where Yuki used to touch him, where Yuki used to breathe his secrets into Mafuyu’s ear. He’s sick of a bed haunted, a life gutted, guilt that tacks itself onto every single smile and laugh. Ugly thoughts. That he shouldn’t be enjoying his life that Yuki is gone. That he, too, should stay in the past, stay in that fucking room that haunts his dreams, stay with Yuki as he grows cold—

And god, but Mafuyu _doesn’t want that,_ he doesn’t want it, _he doesn’t, he doesn’t_ —

_He wants Ritsuka._

He wants Ritsuka’s mouth, Ritsuka’s hands, Ritsuka’s touch, Ritsuka’s heat. He wants the edge on Ritsuka’s voice when he patiently teaches Mafuyu something he’s already taught him twice before, because he knows that Mafuyu can do better. He wants the shy way their knees brush as they sit beside one another on the school balcony with their friends. He wants Ritsuka’s smile across the basketball court from him as he scores three points; across the glinting, stagelit platform as Mafuyu _sings_.

He wants the novelty of what he and Ritsuka have, the gentle way they learn one another’s bodies, the new feeling of their fingers twining in one another and lips brushing. Yuki was always as cold as winter wind. Ritsuka is a hard, fierce warmth.

Mafuyu’s fingers dig into the flesh of his arms, the nape of his neck, the small of his back, and he can only think about Ritsuka’s fingers. He wants to be fucking touched, he wants to be touched by the boy he loves.

The bedsheets crumple into a mess behind him as he leaps from the mattress.

-

Mafuyu thinks he can taste the first hints of the winds of autumn today as he steps off of the train that he knows stops closest to Ritsuka’s house, a hand fisted tight in the front of his shirt to keep cooler air from entering and the wind in his hair. It’s incredible how Tokyo does that, torments them with the heat one day and the cold the next, as though reminding each of her residents that nothing is forever; her seasons, ephemeral. As with the way the notes of music ring out over the heads of the audience and die. As with love.

He doesn’t mind much, thoughts far away from the train, or the wind, or the way his curls levitate over his head from the way the bedsheets mussed them into ruin or the uniform he’s still wearing. Mafuyu runs the path towards Ritsuka’s house, pulse beating wildly.

Mafuyu knows what it is that drives him with the nauseating sense of panic towards Ritsuka’s home; he tastes the same worry on his tongue today that reminds him of his long walk to Yuki’s, that winter day. A belated sense of desperation he’s long since learned to loathe about himself. Concern that nips at his Achille’s tendon. _What if_.

He does this frequently; wraps a hand in his hair, and pulls, and hurts himself until he wonders why he is not more; why he’s not louder, why he’s not braver, why he’s not more open, more, more, _more_.

Ritsuka hurt him today, and still Mafuyu runs as though both of their lives depend on it, because he knows Ritsuka to be a kind and gentle person, because he knows Ritsuka to be in pain. Because Mafuyu, too, has taken out his phone to look at Yuki’s profile countless times, to close his eyes and remember the gentle fingers in his hair and the laughter on the wind, close his eyes and wish he too were dead so he could be with Yuki again.

But he’s not dead. Every gasp of searing air in his lungs screams at Mafuyu that he lives. The adrenaline that pounds through his limbs chants it to him. Alive, _alive_. He will let nothing take him just yet, not when he’s found his place, his thing, his passion— _his person_.

When he reaches the door and the brass marker that indicates Ritsuka's number, he hammers on it with abandon, and leans upon it with his elbows, intent on capturing his breath. And when RItsuka opens it, those pretty blue eyes that remind Mafuyu of the sky widen.

“Mafuyu.” He swallows. “What are you doing here?”

Mafuyu’s resigned hands have found his knees; his chest heaves for air. “Can we talk?” He gasps, and Ritsuka’s face whitens as it looks down at him.

“Of course.”

The door shuts, and Mafuyu’s time is running out; he’s keenly aware that the sun is setting, that parents will be home soon, that Ritsuka sometimes has work—perhaps today, perhaps not, he still can’t exactly remember the intricacies of his boyfriend’s busy schedule.

Without warning, his arms throw themselves around Ritsuka’s neck.

Ritsuka makes a shocked noise; for a moment, Mafuyu hovers like that, grabbing, holding on too tightly for either of their own good.

But then, Ritsuka’s hands are at his waist, and Mafuyu moans a sound of relief.

Just this is enough. Just them touching like this, Mafuyu’s fingers in Ritsuka’s fine, soft, midnight hair and Ritsuka’s big hands at the sensitive spot along his lower spine. Mafuyu gasps as he’s pressed closer, and his body is set aflame.

“Tell me,” he’s pleading, and it’s loud, too loud, but Ritsuka doesn’t pull away, and god but Mafuyu is trembling so hard his teeth are slamming against one another. “Uenoyama-kun, tell me, please tell me what I did, please tell me how I can make it better, please—”

“You didn’t—“

“ _Please,_ ” Mafuyu begs, because he wants to know, he wants to know everything.

—He hasn’t even asked Ritsuka if it was his first kiss yet, that pristine, glowing moment behind the stage after Mafuyu had _screamed_. There’s still so much Mafuyu doesn’t know. There’s still so much he wants to learn. Ritsuka has a whole being all his own, and when Ritsuka touches him, Mafuyu’s body lights up like nothing he’s felt before, not even his first time, not even with Yuki, _not even him_.

He wants to chase that sound Ritsuka makes when Mafuyu's finger drags behind his ear, the one he imitates now when Mafuyu traces that soft skin again.

“Tell me what I did,” Mafuyu demands again. He squeezes Ritsuka hard. “Tell me anything at all, just don’t be quiet, just don’t keep things from me, just don’t—"

" _I'm sorry I'm not him, okay?!_ ” Ritsuka moans in Mafuyu’s ear. "I'm sorry I'm not good enough. I’m sorry. I’m fucking sorry. I'm sorry I can't make you _smile_ like that, and take _pictures_ of you like that, and write _lyrics_ for you like he could. I'm sorry you had to settle for second when your soulmate died, and that I’ll never fucking compare."

“Uenoyama—“

“I want you so badly sometimes I can’t stand it. I want to be everything to you, and I can’t, and I know I can’t, because how do you be everything to someone who has already had their everything? How does a person compare to that? How could I?” Ritsuka’s tears drip wet and hot into Mafuyu’s hair, and Mafuyu almost steps back in shock, would that he could, but his whole world is this sweet boy, his _Uenoyama-kun_. He can’t pull away.

“No, I don’t—“

“I can’t be him, okay?” Ritsuka pulls back, and his face is contorted in pain, eyes red with moisture. “I can’t be him, I can’t be Yuki for you. We should end this. We should break up. I’m sick of hurting you. I’m sick of trying when I can’t succeed.”

“No, stop it, _stop it!_ ”

Mafuyu’s screaming. His fists hit Ritsuka’s chest. Over and over they pound until he’s out of breath, until Ritsuka is looking down at him in awe and Mafuyu is gasping, pain tearing through him.

“I don’t want you to be Yuki, okay?” He screams, tears dripping down his face. “I don’t want that, _I don’t want him._ I was so angry at him, Uenoyama-kun, I still am, I don’t even know how to handle how angry I am. I want to scream, and hit, and hurt, because he made me hurt. But there’s nothing I can hit. Nobody I can hurt.” Hands tighten. Voice wavers. “I don’t want you to be him, okay? I want you to be _you_."

Ritsuka steps back in a stunned silence, hands about Mafuyu’s hips as though they’re merely an afterthought. Holding him through the abuse Mafuyu has inflicted upon him. Through this pain. Through the feelings Mafuyu doesn’t know how to deal with, not at all, so he keeps them reined in so as not to harm anybody he cares for.

And now he’s screaming at Ritsuka; and now he’s hitting him. Shame wells deep inside Mafuyu’s throat. His sobs are hoarse, desperate.

Mafuyu can’t look Ritsuka in the face; his gaze centers in on his shirt instead. It’s one of the ones Ritsuka wears that always hangs a little too low, shows just too much of his collarbone, and catches Mafuyu’s eye when he’s not paying attention. He loves this shirt. 

“I’m sorry,” he heaves, the weight of the world imbued into one breath, oxygen thick as concrete escaping from his slender body. "I’m sorry there are still days where I can’t get out of bed. I’m sorry there are times where I think of him and my mind just shuts down. I’m sorry, okay? I’m trying. I swear, I swear, Ritsuka, I’m trying, I’m trying because I love you. I love you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t hurt sometimes too."

There’s silence from Ritsuka again; Mafuyu chances a glance at his face only to catch a strained expression.

Ritsuka’s hands are in his hair, wrapping, tugging, and Mafuyu almost faints in relief. At least he can still be touched. After the ways he’s been broken, at least he’s still wanted.

“You love me?” Ritsuka asks, quietly.

Mafuyu wipes at his tears, and nods.

“Fuck, Mafuyu."

Hands are gentle as they wind their way around the back of his neck and tilt his jaw. Mafuyu’s fingers ball into the front of Ritsuka’s shirt as they hover, mere inches apart, Ritsuka shaking, Mafuyu heaving for air.

“ _Please_ ,” Mafuyu begs, and Ritsuka’s mouth is on his.

They kiss.

They kiss, and Mafuyu is dragged into the protection of his boyfriend’s warmth. Arms wrap about his waist as the kiss deepens. They kiss, and he forgets what it’s like to breathe, or why he needs to at all.

They kiss in the messy way that is two sets of lips that aren’t yet familiar with one another, and bodies that don’t know what to do but pull the other desperately close. Mafuyu thinks his head may drift away altogether.

They let one another go in a burst of air. Mafuyu pants as his nails scrape at the underside of Ritsuka’s chin, gentle, curious. They stare at one another with bewilderment etched in the line of their faces; finally, Mafuyu smiles, and Ritsuka follows suit.

“Fuck,” Ritsuka finally breathes. “I forgot how hard it is to think after—I feel like I don’t know anything, anymore.”

Mafuyu blinks large eyes up at Ritsuka. “I really make you feel that way?”

“Really, really.” Ritsuka touches Mafuyu’s chin; the gentle quality of his eyes reminds Mafuyu of sea foam. “You’re like magic, Mafuyu."

Mafuyu’s head finds Ritsuka’s chest.

“I know that I love you,” Mafuyu whispers. “No matter how I felt then. No matter how I felt before. No matter that I loved someone else. I love you now, Uenoyama Ritsuka. Is that okay? Is that—enough?”

“It’s more than enough,” Ritsuka says, and he means it.

Their fingers twine together, and Mafuyu is led deeper into the apartment. Later, if it gets any warmer, maybe they’ll go out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> // end!
> 
> I think I was halfway through writing this story before realizing just what it is I felt that I needed to portray by the final chapter. I apologize for any inconsistencies in metaphor in the meantime <3
> 
> I hope you've enjoyed my story—for those of you who have been around since January and stuck with me through months of inactivity in which I was winding my own grief too tightly around Mafuyu's to write anything respectful of him or his own experiences, thank you for waiting.
> 
> You can follow me on my tiny lil [Twitter](http://www.twitter.com/iliawrites) account where I post fic updates and pretty fanart, or check back here later for the AkiGetsu fic that I've been stitching together in my mind over the last few days, because we all have a type of pain and essentially I'm fucked because Ugetsu is mine.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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